Robert Bruno labored for decades to build one of America’s most striking houses, but died before he could complete it. Is there a way to preserve his work and legacy?

Unfinished

The Life and Work of Robert Bruno

Robert Bruno's Steel House sits on a ridge in Ransom Canyon, a residential community east of Lubbock, TX. Troy Oxford/Staff

Published Jan. 30, 2015

Robert Bruno stands next to his Steel House. Courtesy of Robert Bruno

LUBBOCK — You first see it, this unlikely vision, shortly after turning onto Canyon View Drive, a gently rolling street lined by the kind of anonymous homes that define American suburbia.

What is peeking up over the horizon is something decidedly different, however, and soon enough you will come upon it in all its remarkable glory: a four-legged organism of blackened steel perched on a scruffy ridge, its curving forms resolving themselves in a postcard view over the blue waters of a recreational lake. It could easily be something landed from outer space, the kind of house a James Bond villain might occupy, if he were to put down roots in a nondescript residential development 15 minutes from the drowsy heart of downtown Lubbock.

Inside, there are no aliens and no cinema bad guys. The house itself is unoccupied and has been since 2008, when Robert Bruno, the charismatic if somewhat mysterious sculptor who had made the house his life’s work, died at age 64 after a prolonged battle with colon cancer.

As meticulous as he was capricious, Bruno had built the house with virtually no assistance over the course of some 30 years, designing and modifying it as he went, frequently tearing out portions that no longer pleased him. On an apparent whim, he was known to jettison months of work. It was a process that seemed to take as many steps backward as forward and left friends and neighbors to wonder if he would ever finish. Indeed, after so many decades, they had come to understand that finishing was something that didn’t matter to him.

“The truthful answer is it was unimportant,” says Dudley Thompson, a retired Lubbock architect who was a longtime Bruno confidant. “I visited him frequently while he was doing it. It rarely came up. He just enjoyed doing it. ... The doing it as he thought it should be done was his only priority.”

Bruno himself was explicit about his aims. “The motivation here is really to do something that has some aesthetic value. I’m not particularly concerned about having a house,” he said in a video shot toward the end of his life. “I build it because I like doing sculpture.”

“The motivation here is really to do something that has some aesthetic value. I’m not particularly concerned about having a house. I build it because I like doing sculpture.”

Robert Bruno

At the time of his death, it was still far from complete. Floors were unfinished, with gaping voids between its multiple levels. Bruno’s plan to plaster the walls with castings taken from naked female models — to fully integrate the softness of the body into the hardened steel of the house — was unrealized, and it was unclear whether he had dropped the risqué idea altogether. The hollow legs, which were to include a library and an aquarium, were still in development. He had only moved into one of its incomplete bedrooms in his final months, so he might at least have a chance to experience the house in some capacity during the waning days of his life.

Today, that house sits vacant and incomplete on unkempt grounds strewn with cacti, scrap metal and his own jury-rigged construction equipment, a moldering steel shell with an uncertain future. Meanwhile, much of his other work, a catalog as remarkable as it is diverse — Bruno designed jewelry, furniture, sculptures both large and small and even another house — is either forgotten, neglected or lost altogether.

Invention brings wealth

With a round face, pillowy features and a gentle disposition, Robert Bruno had the bearing of a friendly Disney character. Born in Los Angeles in 1945, he spent his adolescence shuttling between divorced parents in the United States and Mexico. A natural romantic from his earliest days, he had little patience for the strictures of convention.

When he met the woman who would become his wife, Patricia Mills, she was a Catholic postulant, on track to become a nun. He wooed her by stuffing her college desk drawer with flowers and candy. (They divorced, amicably, in 2002.) They moved to Lubbock in 1971 so he could teach art in the architecture school at Texas Tech University, but his quirky pedagogical methods, like having students draw a room upside down and inside out, rubbed some traditionalists the wrong way, and he broke with the school.

“I’m not exactly sure what happened with his tenure,” says Andrew Vernooy, dean of the architecture school and a Bruno admirer. “I’m not sure he wanted to be all that tied down.”

He could leave that job and spend his days traveling and working on his house because he was unbound by financial constraint, in no small measure due to his own inventive genius. In 1982, as a birthday present for Patricia, who had turned to environmentalism and was then working for the local water district, he designed an irrigation unit that conserved water and energy. Soon enough, it was adopted across the Southwest, and the small company they founded to market it, P&R Surge Systems — the name was drawn from their first initials — was taking in millions in revenue.

Bruno never had much interest in that company, however, and he and his wife had moved on from it after their divorce. Before his death, he arranged for majority ownership to pass to Henry Martinez, 54, a loyal employee who had worked for the company since 1986 and now acts as caretaker of the house. It was a move that friends describe as typical of his generosity. “He’d give his shirt off his back to you,” Martinez says.

He preferred, anyway, to focus on the house, which had been his passion since 1973, when he began sketching out plans on scraps of paper. If the local building department had any idea that it was going to be decades in the making, and that it might look like a wonky mechanical mushroom, Bruno would never have gotten the permit to begin construction. The floor plans he submitted didn’t seem threatening to Lubbock’s unsuspecting bureaucrats, and it set off no red flags. It didn’t matter that Bruno was a sculptor and not a licensed architect; by law, anyone can build their own home in Texas. (Having learned its lesson, however, Lubbock no longer grants open-ended building approvals.)

It was a heady moment to begin such a project. The war in Vietnam was still raging, and though he had already been excused from the draft, because of the dangerously acute sensitivity of his hearing, its specter was pervasive. Bruno’s Age of Aquarius generation was, in Timothy Leary’s memorable formulation, turning on, tuning in and dropping out.

For the most committed, that meant voluntarily retreating from the culture at large into experimental communities, often in the wide-open spaces of the American West, where personal freedom was a sacred tradition. Their remaking of the social contract was embodied by the spaces they designed for themselves, characterized by a do-it-yourself architecture of organic forms thought to be in harmony with the natural world. The most ambitious of these collectives was Arcosanti, an Arizona community of archaic structures begun in 1970 under the direction of the Italian-born architect Paolo Soleri. It lives on today, supported by tourism and the sale of wind chimes designed by Soleri, who died in 2013.

Another visionary of that era, R. Buckminster Fuller, imagined futuristic metal dwellings sprouting from the Western landscape. The inventor of the geodesic dome, a favorite of the new age set, Fuller was famous for asking architects, “How much does your house weigh?” Bruno was unusual in that he could answer readily and with a high degree of accuracy: about 110 tons. While Fuller’s question was freighted with utopian notions of sustainability — he thought houses on “spaceship Earth” should use as little material as possible — for Bruno it was more a matter of practical economics. He knew how much his house weighed because he had purchased the scraps of quarter-inch steel plate used to build it by the pound, and he had welded each and every one of those pieces into place with his own hands.

“It was a life’s work,” says Mark Gunderson, a Fort Worth architect who developed a lasting friendship with Bruno after taking a drawing class with him at Texas Tech in 1973. “He found it ridiculous that architects conceived of something and drew it and then gave it to somebody else to build and that this all had to be done on a sheet of paper and you never had a chance to revisit it.”

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That would not be a problem for Bruno. To ensure that he would always be able to make changes on the fly, he acted as his own construction crew, aided only occasionally by a handyman — Martinez’s younger brother, Alfred — or his teenage daughter, Christina. “He used to pay me to come help him, but he just wanted to spend time with me,” recalled Christina, now 28 and living in Florida, who is the house’s owner. “We didn’t get a lot of work done.”

As the house rose from its concrete pilings, that work required the services of a hydraulic crane. Bruno built one himself. From a long pivot-arm, he suspended a small basket, a perch from which he could sit with a cutting torch and other welding tools. A hand-held control box allowed him to maneuver this seat in any direction with his thumbs — he designed and built that, too. Archival photographs of the house under construction show him suspended above the steel carapace, his feet dangling, torch in hand, a man fully at home in the world.

“The intimacy and the immediacy of one person working with one material over time was what he believed artistic practice was about,” Gunderson says.

The making of the Steel House

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Photos courtesy of Robert Bruno

A four-legged beast

By the end of his life, the house had grown into a four-legged beast, with three principal levels sprawling over some 2,200 square feet. To enter it from the street, one crossed a short gangplank, as if boarding a ship, which led to an arched doorway fronted by a gate of looping steel. Passing through it, one fully entered Bruno’s world, a multidimensional universe of swooping ribbons of rust-colored steel, with floors shifting up and down, and walls twisting and turning and fusing into themselves. Beckoning one forward into the space was a sunken living room with a lozenge-shaped picture window, its panes divided by curving steel tracery, that looked out dramatically on Lake Ransom Canyon.

Bruno’s makeshift bedroom, minimally furnished with a bed, a streamlined wooden desk he designed for himself and an antique Chinese cabinet, was set in an adjacent alcove, with a small bathroom to its side. A kitchen and second bedroom, stuffed with junk, could also be found on that main level. A torquing stairwell, with treads of dark olivewood, led to the top floor, an aerie with a long curving window and a patio off to the side, a space that seemed like nothing so much as the bridge of a ship.

“If you look at it in the aspects of a house, I don’t know why anyone would want to live in it, but of course it’s art,” says Charles Hobbs, 79, a retiree with the bearing of John Wayne. Hobbs watched Bruno from the porch of his ranch house across the street. “I made the mistake one day of asking him if he was going to paint it, and he straightened me out real quick. If you painted it, it would be just like any other house.”

Inside the Steel House

Rotate view

In the years since Bruno’s death, Hobbs has become something of an informal, if unlikely, information officer, dispensing facts and anecdotes about the house — along with parking regulations — to the steady stream of pilgrims who have come to see it for themselves. In 2013, Vogue magazine arrived, the fashion bible deeming it a suitably futuristic backdrop for models wearing mod pastel coats, Google Glass eyewear and little else.

Today, the house has achieved a certain fame, and neighbors who greeted it with a skepticism bordering on hostility now look on it with protective pride. “Lubbock doesn’t have that many nice things, except Buddy Holly,” says Martinez. “They used to be very suspicious of it, but now they’re very open to it being here.”

Sculpting a life

Though Bruno will forever be identified as the designer of the Steel House, he came to architecture by accident and had no formal training in that profession. He was a sculptor by trade and inclination, and the great steel amoeba that straddles Ransom Canyon was more than anything else a means of developing his ideas in that medium at a habitable scale.

The inspiration for the Steel House was in fact a sculpture he had made two years earlier, also of weathering steel but with a burnt orange patina. A four-legged construction the size of a small elephant, it has the appearance, depending on your angle of approach and frame of mind, of a lumbering pachyderm, an automatic pistol or some kind of vehicle from Star Wars, though it predated that space epic by a good five years.

“He used to go out and sit beneath it and eat his lunch,” daughter Christina Bruno says. “And he thought, ‘Maybe if I built this on a larger scale, it could be a house to live in.’”

If you would like to sit beneath it yourself, you will find it, at least for the moment, stranded in an unkempt yard alongside a cotton field just outside of Lubbock, on property owned by friends who let him use the space for storage. It is, sadly, one of the only extant Bruno works whose location is known.

Bruno’s steel sculpture in a field outside of downtown Lubbock was an inspiration for the Steel House. Troy Oxford/Staff

In fact, Bruno began making sculpture as a boy in Mexico City, where he lived during the school year with his mother and stepfather, an orthopedic surgeon, in an apartment on the exclusive Paseo de la Reforma. “He was very interested in anything having to do with art,” says his mother, Dolores Puig. “And of course water skiing and girls.”

He was discovered as an artist around the age of 15. Using plaster and gesso in his bedroom, he had sculpted a sinuous, muscular figure apparently striding out of the wall. A family friend saw it and took a picture, and soon it was in a magazine. Something of a savant, he also graced a hallway with a mural depicting Mexico City’s romantic café society figures in various states of undress, done in an idiosyncratic interpretation of the 1930s style of Diego Rivera and Gabriel Orozco.

Bruno began working with steel as a student at Dominican College, a now-defunct Catholic school near the home of his father, in Racine, Wis. That was where he met Mills, then on a leave of absence from a convent, taking classes so she could teach art after taking her vows. “He was extremely bright, very sensitive and a little dyslexic,” she recalls. “He taught me opera. Music was the inspiration for his art.” Among his favorites were Beethoven, Boccherini and Rossini.

One day he took her up to the roof of the main college building, where he had made a swooping assemblage of steel ribbons he called The Bird. They married in 1969, after Bruno received a master’s degree in sculpture from Notre Dame.

The steel sculpture The Bird, on a roof at Dominican College, in Racine, Wis. Courtesy of Robert Bruno

Their life together in the coming years was peripatetic, taking them first to Owensboro, Ky., where Bruno taught sculpture at Brescia University, and then to Englewood, Calif., where the two lived in a small house near Bruno’s grandparents. To make ends meet, he took a job as a salesman at a department store, but soon after began working for a jeweler, a job at which he could apply his prodigious gifts for design.

Never one to do anything halfway, he got himself certified by the Gemological Institute of America and then hand-built his own spectrometer, so he could identify different stones. “He made me this precious little pendant, which looked like a basket with three diamonds and a dark amber citrine quartz,” Mills recalls.

At the same time, he was doing sculpture, experimenting with conceptual works that were at once wry and clever. “One time he dug a hole and cast it in plaster, and he hung it on a rope with a mirror under it so you could see the bottom of it,” says Mills. In that same spirit, he made a series of inflatable Rorschach blots constructed of slick black plastic, each one several feet tall. “It was frivolous. But it was an example of his humor and his creativity.”

Bruno’s sculptures at the home of his grandparents in Vista, Calif. Courtesy of Robert Bruno

It was also the kind of provocative work that was popular in avant-garde circles of the late 1960s, in that it challenged the authority, seriousness and relentless formalism of doctrinaire modern art.

In truth, Bruno wasn’t that interested in puncturing the sacred cows of contemporary artistic practice. His work hewed closer to that of Anthony Caro, the English sculptor revered for his modern totems, than Andy Warhol, the enfant terrible of American art. “Irony wasn’t in his toolbox,” says Gunderson. “It’s pure from the heart.” Picking up on the work he had begun on the roof at Dominican College, he returned to the medium of steel, but now at a larger scale than ever before. In that, Bruno bears some similarity to his contemporary, Richard Serra, who began experimenting with large plates of curved corten steel during the same period.

Working in the backyard of his grandparents’ home in Vista, Calif., he constructed a pair of abstract organic sculptures that seemed to grow from the earth. The first, an attenuated column that expanded as it rose, had the appearance of a tree shorn of its branches and foliage. The second looked like nothing so much as an inverted mushroom, though one that was a good 15 feet tall. He called it The Onion.

A stone house

He continued working in that vein after arriving in Lubbock to teach art in the architecture school of Texas Tech. That environment pushed his thinking in an architectural direction, leading eventually to the idea of a sculpture that could accommodate a life.

“In the beginning, I was all excited to have a house,” Mills says. “But then I realized it was a process. I asked where the outlets are, and he said that was not important. He said, two more years, two more years. He said two more years for 28 years.” When they divorced, in 2002, he was still years from finishing.

That endless state of becoming was not just the product of Bruno’s changing vision and insistence on executing every detail himself. During the later years of construction, he had received an offer he couldn’t refuse, but one that would place additional demands on his time.

The offer was a chance to create another work of architecture, and for a client who would allow him to build something that would take the ideas of the Steel House and — as he had encouraged his students — turn them upside down and inside out. And he could do it right down the block.

That saga began on a morning in the early 1980s, when Mark Lawson, a specialist in obstetric ultrasound, cruised past the Steel House on his motorcycle. “I can still remember it like it was yesterday,” he says. “I stopped and got off my bike and went up to the front door and said, ‘Permission to come aboard.’ It was like some kind of ship, like nothing I’d ever seen.”

So began a 20-year friendship, but one that did not immediately generate a commission. When Lawson was coincidentally approached about the sale of a lot in Ransom Canyon and found it was just down the street from the Steel House, he scooped it up for $13,000. Even still, it was several years before he got up the nerve to ask Bruno if he’d consider building him a house. “One day a week we’d eat dinner together and talk about the world and politics and architecture,” Lawson says. “In conversation I just kind of said, would you design a house for me?”

That initiated a three-year period of philosophical investigation and design development; ground was finally broken in 1991. “He was educating me about living space,” says Lawson. “We looked at books of homes around the world, things that he thought were unique.” Among those influences was Casapueblo, a seaside resort of curving whitewashed stucco created by the Uruguayan artist Carlos Páez Vilaró, who began work on it in the 1950s and described it as a “living sculpture.” Vilaró claimed the organic design, nestled into a bluff, was modeled on the nests of the South American hornero bird.

But Bruno’s most profound inspiration was the Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí, who was himself famous for a project left incomplete, his magisterial Sagrada Família basilica. “He had an affinity for that creative urge that is Barcelona,” says the Lubbock architect Thompson. That affinity was amplified by the fact that Bruno, with his Spanish-Mexican heritage, spoke Catalan like a native. According to Thompson, that gave him “a very close association with Gaudí.”

Gaudí was so important a lodestar that Bruno dispatched Lawson and Manfred Kaiter, the German-born stonemason who would build the house, to Spain to study Gaudí’s work. In particular, they were to learn from his use of stone and decorative tile at the Park Güell, Gaudí’s masterpiece of organic form.

Still at work on his own Steel House, Bruno wasn’t prepared to personally construct another house. That job was left to Kaiter, a charismatic figure himself, who had escaped Nazi Germany in his youth, and later married the sister of Lubbock icon Buddy Holly. “Robert did not lay a rock. He was designer,” Lawson says. “He would come around in the afternoon and put X’s on rocks that were in the wrong place.”

Kaiter mostly got them right, and there were a lot of them: some 460 tons of rough-cut beige stone, salvaged rubble from a highway being drilled through the Franklin Mountains outside of El Paso. Truckers returning empty from Mexico picked up the stone for free and sold it to Lawson at minimal cost. There was also decorative tile in the Gaudí style — vast expanses of it covering curving roofs and walls, most of it imported from Mexico. Work progressed on and off over nine years. “Building was a hobby for us,” says Lawson. “We worked when we could. We worked when we had money.”

The result is a quirky pile of beige rock and candy-colored tile that burrows into a sloping site and is surmounted by a spiraling cupola. At first glance, it looks like something out of a cartoon, and indeed the neighbors affectionately refer to it as the Flintstones House. Closer inspection reveals an architectural language in many ways comparable to that of the Steel House, an exploration of similar forms but in craggy rock instead of weathering metal. Here, too, Bruno imagined a world of curving walls, arched windows divided by tracery, shifting floor planes and non-orthogonal spaces.

The Stone House, which sits a short distance away from the Steel House, is a quirky pile of beige rock and candy-colored tile that locals refer to as the Flintstones House. Courtesy of Robert Bruno

“The Steel House was more his treehouse,” Thompson says. “The Stone House was more his cave.” He had talked to his friends about following these two projects with another house in another medium: glass. He also dreamed of a house that could extend hydraulically over a ravine. “He had grand ideas for more houses,” Mills says. “I could see his visions, and they were fabulous.”

Uncertain future

While it is to tempting to imagine what fantasies Bruno might have conjured, there is grave concern for the future of the works he did actually produce. There is no group or organization dedicated to the care and maintenance of his output. Even Bruno’s family members have no comprehensive record or catalog of the countless smaller works of jewelry, furniture and sculpture he created over his career. Much of that output is unaccounted for or lost altogether.

The Bird on the roof of Dominican College in Racine? Gone, along with the college itself, which closed in 1974. The steel sculptures built in the yard of his grandparents in Vista? Whereabouts unknown. Another large sculpture, an assemblage of intersecting steel plates painted red — Bruno called it The Pomegranate — was sold to Paul Harph, a Ransom Canyon surgeon who died in 2013. It, too, is now gone, following the dispersal of Harph’s estate.

The stewardship of Bruno’s architectural legacy in Ransom Canyon is the most troubling. Both the Steel and Stone houses are privately owned, and neither is accessible to the public. Lawson, for his part, considers the Stone House complete and has left it all but empty, in deference to Bruno’s vision. “It is finished,” he says. “What do you put in a house like this? You can’t just go to a local store.”

Members of the Bruno family, however, would like to see the Steel House completed. In pursuit of this goal, Christina Bruno moved to Florida to study the tools of her father’s trade at the Tulsa Welding School in Jacksonville. “I would love to get it to a point where it’s self-sufficient,” she says. “Making it into a historical landmark would remove any control I have over it. I want it to stay in the family.”

Her mother, Patricia Mills, would also like to see it completed. “It’s a fabulous, sensitive piece that the world is waiting to see finished,” she says. “I knew his vision.”

But the contention that anyone, even his closest family members, could know Bruno’s intentions seems doubtful, when he seemed so uncertain of them himself. “The worst thing would be if someone decided they had to finish it,” says Gunderson. “There’s no way to know if what you’re doing is what he would have done. It’s a slippery slope.” The problem is especially acute with Bruno, who habitually undid his own work.

As it is, there are no immediate plans to do anything with the house, and so it remains derelict and in decay, a window on its third-floor bridge space shot out and open to the elements. The pilgrims who come to visit can walk around the unfenced, scraggly site and gape, but the interior is off limits.

Bruno’s construction basket sits as he left it in the scrub beside the Steel House. Troy Oxford/Staff

“I am very concerned about it,” says Vernooy, dean of the architecture school at Texas Tech, of the condition and uncertain future of the house. “It would be a great space for a resident scholar. It would be a great place to hold small music performances. It has a wonderful musical quality. It’s a beautiful space. But none of those fit into anybody’s balance sheet. And like any piece of real estate, it has some ongoing costs. And that’s not something that universities want to take on unless they have some other means of support for it.”

Through the school’s intercession, however, one of Bruno’s works will soon receive a new lease on life. Last year, Texas Tech agreed to purchase the large steel pachyderm that sits out by a Lubbock cotton field. The $35,000 price, to be paid to the Bruno family, will be set aside in an account earmarked for the upkeep of the Steel House.

On April 20, the sculpture will be moved to a place of honor in front of the architecture school, re-establishing that institution’s sundered relationship with Bruno, albeit posthumously.

“He loved conversation, and he loved the philosophy of what he was doing,” Vernooy says. “His sculpture is a reminder of that intellectual commitment and that dialogue.”

NOTE: There is no biography, official or otherwise, of Robert Bruno and no organization or library devoted to his life and work. To reconstruct his life, Mark Lamster relied on extensive interviews with Bruno’s relatives, friends, colleagues and neighbors, as well as family documents and other archival materials.